Structural hemoglobinopathies and thalassemias are congenital hemoglobin (Hb) disorders that cause anemia, morbidity, and mortality resulting from abnormal Hb function. Structurally different normal Hb variants include HbA2, HbF (fetal hemoglobin), and HbA (adult hemog ...
From the clinical perspective, steroids have always held a great deal of interest, since they are highly specific in their function. They do not have a general or systemic effect, but instead regulate specific physiological functions, such as sex differentiation, fetus implantation and gr ...
Urine screenings for drugs of abuse are performed for many reasons, two of the most common being workplace/employment screening and monitoring in drug-dependence treatment centers. In both, the initial screen is commonly an immunoassay. Negative results require no further action. Po ...
Capillary electrophoresis (CE) has several advantages, such as high resolution, speed, and low cost of operation. However, it suffers from two major drawbacks: poor detection limits and matrix effects. Several approaches have been used to overcome these two problems. Here, acetonitrile ...
Antiepileptic drugs vary greatly in chemical structure. Analysis of these compounds by capillary electrophoresis (CE) requires different conditions for each one, or for each group. Acidic drugs can be analyzed easily by capillary zone electrophoresis in borate buffers (1); the neutr ...
Differential activity of genes is one of the major mechanisms underlying a vast array of biological phenomena. Classical genetic approaches (from phenotypes to genes) have proven their exquisite potential for dissection of complex signaling pathways regulating the development ...
Hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) are rare, self-renewing progenitors that give rise to all lineages of blood cells. HSCs can be found in all hematopoietic organs, from the para-aortic mesoderm (1),(2) and yolk sac (3),(4) in fetuses to the bone marrow (reviewed in ref. 5), blood and spleens of adults.
Human hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) can be obtained from a variety of hematopoietic tissues, including bone marrow, blood, cord blood, and fetal liver. Various techniques have been used to fractionate hematopoietic cell populations based on differences in size and density, express ...
The hematopoietic system comprises a concatenated series of stem- and transit-progenitor-cell compartments of progressively restricted potentiality and proliferative capacity (1–5). Analysis of hematopoietic regulation in transplantation models and in marrow rege ...
Human hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) and progenitors can be isolated by enriching for a rare cell population with a combination of monoclonal antibodies (MAbs). Such an isolation scheme involves multi-step procedures including ficoll-density fractionation and presort enric ...
Hematopoietic progenitor and stem cells are believed to lie dormant within the adult bone marrow microenvironment in a state characterized by both mitotic and metabolic quiescence. This state of cell-cycle quiescence has been the focus or target of many studies aimed at identifying cells ...
The hematopoietic progenitors that can be assayed in clonal culture systems represent a continuum of differentiation, which includes multipotential progenitors and very late-committed progenitors with only limited cell-division capabilities (1). The late-committed pr ...
In normal adults, the majority of primitive hematopoietic cells are concentrated in the bone marrow, where they are in contact with a variety of molecules that influence their cell-cycle status, viability, motility, and differentiation. These include components of the extracellular ...
Hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) subsets are defined by the capacity to which their offspring can contribute to the various mature blood-cell lineages. However, the proliferative potential of stem cells is highly dependent on the environment in which they reside, and it is only in retrospect th ...
The stromal compartment of mesenchymal tissues is thought to harbor stem cells that display extensive proliferative capacity and multilineage potential. Stromal stem cells offer a potentially large therapeutic potential in the field of regenerative medicine. Adipose tissue c ...
Cloning by nuclear transfer in mammals has revealed the remarkable ability of an oocyte to reprogram transferred cell nuclei and induce them to recapitulate the developmental program. This chapter summarizes the method used since 1998 for mouse cloning, which differs from that for large a ...
RNA interference (RNAi) is an evolutionary conserved gene-silencing pathway that can be efficiently utilized as a tool to study gene function. RNAi is initiated by long double-stranded RNAs (dsRNAs), which are processed into small duplexes called small-interfering RNAs (siRNAs). In t ...
Fluorescently tagged proteins have become a crucial weapon in the armory of a successful cell biology laboratory. This chapter describes how to produce cRNA coding for a fluorescently tagged protein of choice, such that it is suitable for microinjection and subsequent expression studi ...
Oocytes are extremely large cells that have to coordinate accurate chromosome segregation, asymmetric cytoplasm partitioning together with their own development as fertilizable gametes. For this, they undergo both global (cell cycle progression related) and local changes. It ...
The first meiotic division of mammalian oocytes physiologically occurs in the ovary in the hours preceding ovulation. Fortunately, oocytes removed from their follicular environment will readily undergo this process in culture. Their large size, optical transparency, and effic ...